After the Social Justice Era — What?

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

Not too long ago there was some back and forth about Bluesky and its role in the left during this sad, disturbing period of conservative ascendancy. The general complaint is that the network is full of people who are trying to pretend that the 2010s never ended, that the period of liberal cultural dominance — which is a very far cry from left dominance or material dominance — was still with us. The dream of 2018, they say, is alive on Bluesky. And, well, yeah. I do suspect that the basic claim there is true, the diagnosis of a desire to live in a pleasant enclave, although my exposure to the network is limited. Still, I actually think the nostalgist impulse there is a little more complicated, a little less political, and a little broader than that network. I think that even though a lot of millennials didn’t enjoy the Yelling Social Justice era, it happens to have been their era, to have overlapped with their primes, and so they yearn for the feeling if not the particulars, just as they yearn for Obama-era optimism and the period when technology was something to unabashedly enjoy, before all the reasons for skepticism and criticism crept in.

As I said in the comments of this post by Max Read about the Bluesky debate, I think a lot of this is more of the millennial panic over aging; short-form text-based social media is an uncool millennial thing, and we have reached/are reaching middle age, and the death of Twitter as it once was has made the demise of this vision of the social internet more visible in a way that stokes the fear of aging. People really thought Twitter was forever; that idea is very dark for me, but then as I was saying, for a lot of people the High Twitter period overlapped with the greatest years of self-definition and intensity of experience of their lives. To grasp the fact that young people see the whole thing as archaic … well, it’s as destabilizing as every other way we learn that we’re old. Sure, there’s a generic impulse on that network to build a space where it’s easy to pretend that we’re still living under the authority of a benevolent liberal mod team, to party like it’s the first Trump term. But the impulse is deeper than just wanting to maintain the familiar; it’s also driven by the creeping approach of being truly old, being irrelevant to young people, being infirm, and finally being dead.

But I digress. I was talking about the progressive desire to live in a period of much greater progressive influence. That’s not hard to grasp, anymore than it’s hard to understand Patriots fans who pine for the good old Tom Brady era. The thing is that the only people who are more eager to live under the old rules than the liberals who tried to enforce them are the conservatives who rebelled against them. Almost all of conservative culture now is built on the assumption that conservatives are besieged, that liberals control every institution, and that right-wing people always live under the threat of being purged. This attitude was wrong back then — the right enjoys massive influence in many of the most important sectors of modern society and always has — and is now absurd, given the Trump victory, the federal trifecta and general conservative dominance. And yet so many in the conservative media also want to pretend the bad old days never ended. It tells you something about how politics works here in the mid-2020s.

Every cultural epoch has its expiration date, but few have been left to rot so publicly as the social justice era. The “vibe shift” — a term I’m just as tired of as you are — was predicted fairly regularly for a little while, but seemed for a long time like something unreal, and maybe a little wistful. And then, suddenly, it was real. I’ve previously used a fairly meaningless moment in The New York Times as a signpost for the change, a little indicator of a suddenly altered elite social compact. Things change slowly, imperceptibly, and then all at once. Now everyone knows it’s over. The think pieces are gone, the college kids aren’t protesting, the prestige media have shifted their tone, and the elite consensus that once held representation and harm reduction as sacred commandments has quietly dissolved. The old annoying rhetorical demands — “do better,” “educate yourself,” “this is violence” — no longer compel obedience. You can see it in sporting venues honoring the memory of Charlie Kirk, the corporate Pride campaigns that now tiptoe toward neutrality, in Netflix quietly canceling the fourth “queer trauma” limited series that no one watched, in the fact that universities, once terrified of being called out, now just ride out the outrage cycle until the internet moves on.

And yet, nobody wants to admit it’s over.

Progressives (who, once again, are not the same as the left) won’t let it die because social justice was their period of seeming moral triumph. For a decade, maybe a bit more, progressives didn’t just win cultural arguments but set the terms of debate entirely. The vocabulary of identity and oppression became mandatory. The culture of identity-obsessed HR departments colonized academia, book publishing, elite media, the nonprofit industrial complex and a good swath of government agencies; accordingly, those with elite ambitions bent to those sensibilities whether their support was sincere or not. For a moment, it looked like the social justice set had captured the language of legitimacy itself. I’ve written about the reasons for that takeover before; the short version is that the people behind this moment expertly leveraged the memetic power of the internet to make not being woke seem like a kind of social death. (It was always memes that spurred the social justice advance, and it was always the fear of being socially undesirable that was the sharp end of the stick.) Today, some progressives still can’t let go, because to do so is to admit that the world has moved on and that the moral leverage that once allowed them to dictate norms has evaporated.

And yet the average liberal’s refusal to move on and let go is a pale facsimile of the anti-woke commentator’s desperate clinging. Conservatives won’t let the social justice moment die either, because they need it as their bogeyman; it’s proved to be a great rallying force for the right, and its status as a fundraiser for professional conservative commentators is unmatched. Those types have constructed a vast shadow empire in their heads (corporations, schools, media, the government) still supposedly controlled by the radical campus left of 2015. Their media ecosystem depends on this fantasy. Without it, they have to confront the uncomfortable reality that they are no longer the cultural underdogs but the ascendant force. Admitting that social justice is passé would mean acknowledging victory, and victory brings responsibility. (Famously, once elected, your ideas actually have to be tested in the fires of reality.) So here we are, trapped in the afterglow of a revolution that’s already burned out, with each side invested in pretending the fire still rages.

The social justice era was never as widely hegemonic as either side thought. It was certainly deeply hegemonic in certain spaces, and that produced a lot of unfortunate, unfair and unhelpful scenarios. I spent a lot of time talking about them, back in them days. It’s important to be able to distinguish between depth and breadth. If you were a conservative professor at a liberal school, the depth of your disadvantage was severe indeed. But it’s also essential that we not overgeneralize that power. The supposed omnipotence of “wokeness” was typically confined to certain urban, highly educated spaces that shape media discourse but don’t actually represent the broader country. Its rules were enforced mainly through social capital — who got platformed and who got dragged — not through the state or any formal institution. Yes, there are exceptions, very unfortunate ones. And, I would argue, it was precisely when those ideas and tactics broke the containment of smaller, more elite discursive spaces like the universities and newsmedia that the backlash began. In a weird way, the success of the social justice movement triggered its own collapse.

Exceptions aside, social justice power was usually more vibes than policy, more etiquette than law. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t destructive! But it’s probably the quintessential example of rule by happenstance rather than systematic rule; its enforcement of its Byzantine laws and abstruse moral schema was always driven by availability bias, by whim, and by chance. The people who got hit with the woke stick were those who were available to be hit, which is why so much of the damage was done in progressive-on-progressive fire episodes and why so rarely were conservative politicians ever affected. That’s also why, to pick a random example, someone like Dr. Dre could avoid cancellation despite his history with violence against women — because when there’s no actual formal procedure, there’s no consistency. That’s another reason why it all collapsed so quickly, its arbitrary nature. And there is of course the ever-present paradox that when everyone’s livelihood depends on not saying the wrong thing, the wrong thing will eventually be said. The fear that kept it going couldn’t last forever.

But the myths remain. A certain influential subset of progressives remain emotionally tethered to the idea that we’re living in 2017, trying to defend a pre-ironized vision of a a “safe space,” still insisting that diversity training can function as the frontier of justice and that power can be dismantled by collectively scolding people online. These habits are hard to break because they provided moral clarity and community in an otherwise fragmented world. The social justice era offered a coherent worldview: You could always locate yourself as righteous by identifying oppression and naming it. You didn’t have to fix material inequality, just speak the right language about it. The politics were exhausting, yes, but also comforting. They were the paradoxical belief set of revolutionaries who had preemptively given up.

To accept that the moment is over means facing a void. The problems that animated social justice, like racism, sexism, homophobia and inequality — which, yes, are very real and need to be opposed — haven’t gone anywhere. What’s gone, for most of us, is the illusion that these could be solved through the cultural policing of language and representation. Many professional progressives sensed this but couldn’t quite say it; many now can, but others are still trapped in the old fear and the old yearning. So they continue to perform the old rituals: apologies for privilege, ritual denunciations of microaggressions, interminable debates about which words are acceptable. As diminished as all these practices are, they still chug along in some form or another. It’s cargo cult politics, going through the motions of a religious order whose gods have already left.

Conservatives, meanwhile, can’t stop shadowboxing with ghosts. Every book, every podcast, every Substack essay in their ecosystem depends on the existence of a censorious, omnipotent “woke mob.” But the mob isn’t really there anymore. There’s a handful of noisy activists on social media, sure, but they don’t decide what gets published, what TV shows get made or who gets fired; increasingly, even their natural constituencies treat them as a ridiculous anachronism. If anything, the pendulum has swung hard in the other direction: DEI programs are being quietly dismantled, campus speech codes have been gutted and corporations are scrubbing their websites of the very equity language they trumpeted five years ago. None of that shit ever meant anything, obviously. It was always for show. Indeed, the real marker of the difference between a leftist critic of social justice politics and a conservative one is that the leftist critic complains because the corporation isn’t actually sincere and doesn’t actually care while the conservative conservative complains that they are and do.

Yet for all of the outward signs, the conservative narrative demands that we still live under “woke tyranny.” It’s a convenient excuse for everything. Lose a job? Blame cancel culture. Your kid can’t get into college? Diversity quotas. Your film flopped? Hollywood’s too woke. This is the secret comfort of victimhood, right? It explains the world. I know this isn’t a particularly novel thing to say, but there still is a real irony in the way that conservative and woke narratives coalesce around the obsession with the idea that one has been oppressed. The right, for all its macho posturing, has grown addicted to the same thing that once animated the Tumblr left: a sense of persecution that grants moral meaning.

So both camps cling to the corpse. The radlibs because they can’t face irrelevance, the anti-wokies because they can’t face responsibility, and the professionals because they’re afraid the money spigot will be turned off in a brutal media environment. Meanwhile, the culture has already moved on. We live in a moment defined not by moral crusade but by exhaustion. The default political mood is boredom, even in the face of relentless scandal and a genuine creeping authoritarianism. The generational energy that once went into activism has migrated elsewhere, into fitness, aesthetics, entrepreneurship, self-optimization, crypto, fandom. The kids who might have been the next generation of activists are instead building personal brands or quietly retreating into apolitical hobbies. And as much as the activists drive my crazy, I have after all been one for much of my life, and I suppose I still am, this devolution into conspiracism and pathetic stabs at getting rich quick is certainly worse.

The end of the social justice era hasn’t ushered in a renaissance of solidarity or material politics. Instead it’s ushered in a particular kind of uneasy quiet, the quiet of the sickbed. We’ve replaced the shrill certainties of moral policing with a kind of cynical detachment. No one believes anymore that a better world is coming, unless perhaps it’s delivered by technology, and yet no one feels like fighting about it either. The death of one moral order hasn’t produced another. It’s only produced drift. And the refusal to acknowledge that drift matters. As long as very attention-hungry emissaries from both sides pretend we’re still living under wokeness, we can’t grapple with what’s actually happening. The Bluesky progs keep wasting energy defending cultural norms that no one is attacking anymore, and the right keeps manufacturing outrage against enemies who no longer exist. Everyone’s fighting yesterday’s war because it’s safer than confronting today’s uncertainty.

And there’s a deeper reason we can’t let go: For a lot of people, acolytes and heretics, friend and foe, pro and con, the social justice era was the last time politics felt truly alive. For a while, there was a sense that words mattered, that the culture could change overnight, that history was moving. It was often ugly, always performative, and usually absurd, and in so many ways I’m glad it’s gone … but it was something. Compare that to the flat, affectless politics of 2025, numbness In the face of real crisis, where every controversy is instantly monetized and forgotten. No wonder people cling to the memory. But nostalgia isn’t analysis. Pretending that the moral consensus of 2015 still rules is like insisting that disco still dominates pop music because you once owned a pair of bell-bottoms. The world has changed, even if admitting it makes us feel unmoored. The social justice era is over, and what comes next is unclear. But clarity requires honesty, and honesty requires saying the thing no one wants to say: The revolution came and went. All of that’s over now.

The moral vocabulary that once governed polite society now feels antique, like the slang of a defunct subculture. The rituals continue out of inertia, the way people still say “bless you” after sneezes. The establishmentarian liberals can’t admit they’ve lost hegemony; the right can’t admit they’ve won. And so the corpse lies there, embalmed in discourse, while everyone keeps insisting they can still hear it breathe.